HEY. This information might be of some interest: I've posted my first bit of Bartimaeus fanart. It's of Nathaniel and Kitty (big surprise), and if you want to take a look click the "homepage" link in my profile. Other than that, besides the usual groveling and begging for forgiveness because of the delay, I've got nothing else to say. (general sigh of relief from the readers) Great, guys. Thanks. Enjoy the chapter.
Disclaimer: The Bartimaeus Trilogy is the property of Jonathan Stroud.
Accepting Irony
Chapter 4
"Will you hurry up and choose already?" Kitty snapped. Across the table from her, Mandrake serenely turned to a new section of the menu, ignoring her entirely. Kitty slumped down in her chair, leaning the side of her face against her fist, and scowled unseen at a waiter passing by with a tray loaded with food. Being around all these people eating had only made Kitty miss the activity more, and it was making her irritable.
"All right," the magician said at last, and folded up his menu.
"About time," Kitty said sourly, straightening up.
"You're extremely impatient, you know that?" he asked mildly, sipping from the glass of water in front of him on the table. Kitty traced the edges of a fork with a transparent finger and huffed. "You're the most insensitive pig I've ever met. I don't care when you order your food. Did it ever occur to you that watching all these people live would depress me?"
"How was I supposed to figure that out?" he demanded quietly, looking at her like she was crazy. He could make such an expression without appearing to be staring incredulously at thin air because they were at a corner table, and he had wisely chosen the seat facing away from the rest of the room. "Why didn't you just say that in the first place instead of pestering me?"
"What're you getting?" Kitty asked, unable to come up with a reasonable answer to his question.
"Chicken parmesan," he answered, thankfully not commenting on her sudden change of topic. Kitty groaned softly, missing eating more than ever. Another waiter passed with something spicy, and Kitty dropped her head into her arms.
"Oh, you're just being dramatic," Mandrake said dismissively at her display of woe. "Not being able to shovel in food can't possibly that that painful."
"Easy for you to say when your digestive tract is still solid," Kitty said darkly. Mandrake winced lightly and took another drink of water. "Touché."
Finally, she thought. She argued frequently with Mandrake, but she hadn't yet managed to make a point he couldn't counter. Somewhat mollified by her minor victory, she sat back and surveyed the restaurant with mild interest, looking at it on several different planes and seeing how it changed. The restaurant was crowded with magicians, and Kitty watched the many-colored imps floating at their masters' shoulders with mild amusement. Several of them were making faces at their captors without their knowledge, and a few seemed to be communicating with each other using some bizarre sign language involving several twirls of the tail and distortion of facial features. And out the window there was…
Kitty frowned and leaned to the left, unable to see out the window entirely because of Mandrake's head blocking her view.
"What?" he asked curiously, but she didn't answer. A dark shadow was descending rapidly from the sky, straight towards the restaurant, but no one on the street seemed to be noticing a thing. The shadow twisted itself into a whirlwind, and Kitty leapt to her feet.
"Kitty, what–?"
"Come on!"
Thinking "arm" with all her might, Kitty snatched Mandrake's wrist and started to tug him upwards. The one fortunate thing about the situation was that everyone was too distracted by the front wall of the restaurant being ripped away to notice that Mandrake was being dragged along by some invisible force. The rest stunk.
Several magicians and their imps were immediately consumed by the swirling shadow. The rest were scrambling away as quickly as they were able, clawing at each other to get ahead. Surprisingly, the shadow didn't pursue them – it moved forwards very slowly towards Kitty and Mandrake, whom she was dragging towards the emergency exit in the back of the restaurant.
Burning red eyes materialized in the midst of the dark whirlwind.
Kitty Jones…
The voice was guttural and shook the remainder of the building, but something about it was familiar. For a wild moment Kitty wondered if it was Bartimaeus…but instinct told her no. That, and the glimpse she got of one of the higher planes. The thing's shape was distorted, but it was vaguely reminiscent of a skeleton.
Kitty swore and started dragging Mandrake back faster.
"Move, will you?" she hissed. "Use – your – legs!"
Mandrake staggered into an upright position, and the shadow writhed and coiled, beginning to shrink down into a new shape. Kitty knew what it would be – Gladstone's bones. The golden mask glinted in the flickering electric lights of the building.
"Holy–"
Kitty grabbed at Mandrake's collar and felt herself beginning to be drawn into his body – she had forgotten to concentrate on what she was trying to hang onto. Struck by a sudden idea, she stopped resisting and allowed her form to be drawn into the magician.
"What are you doing?" Mandrake yelled, but only inside his head.
"If you can't run on your own," Kitty said firmly, using Mandrake's mouth and Mandrake's voice, "I'll run for you."
And she bolted for the door. Honorius let out an unearthly cry and sprang after her, a Detonation shattering the floor at Mandrake's heels. The force pitched them forward, and Kitty registered the pain as they hit the wall. Wincing, but still able to move, Kitty pulled the door open and ran out, Mandrake's exclamations of pain making her ears ring.
"Shut up!" she snapped at him, pelting down the sidewalk as another Detonation blasted the door and surrounding wall apart. "I'm trying to think."
Skidding into an alley, Kitty sized up the fire escape on the side and the dead end further down.
"Brilliant," Mandrake yelled. "Really ingenious. Get us trapped in an alley – this is the best idea I've ever been privileged to share."
"Who talks like that in a tense situation?" Kitty yelled, grabbing onto the metal ladder and hauling Mandrake's body upwards. "This stupid, swanky coat is getting the way."
She began to shrug out of it as she reached the landing and headed towards the next ladder.
"Don't you dare!" Mandrake shouted warningly, but the coat was already off and left behind. Kitty was halfway up to the next level, the metal rattling under Mandrake's feet.
"You can't wear sensible shoes, either," she grumbled, nearly slipping on a rung.
"Leave my shoes out of this. I'd like to know why you left my coat there. It's like a sign pointing toward us going 'They went this way"! But you didn't think of that, did you?"
"Shut up!" she yelled again. Honorius had drawn level with the alley and his red eyes locked onto them immediately.
"Can't you hold him off or something?" Mandrake demanded, sounding panicky. "Do you retain any of your powers in my body?"
Kitty faltered, trying to look at things on another plane while climbing another ladder. She succeeded, and it nearly made her lose her grip.
"Yes, but I don't think I can attack anything. Don't you need incantations for that?"
"How would I know?"
"You're the bloody magician! You do something! I'm saving your arse yet again and all you can do is yell at me!"
"Say these words as I think them," Mandrake ordered, and quickly rattled off a string of words Kitty had never heard. She repeated them, stumbling over some of the syllables, and a fire ignited at Mandrake's fingertips. Both of them cried out in pain at the same time. Mandrake shouted another string of words that Kitty repeated, and the fire vanished, leaving Mandrake with scalded fingertips on one hand.
"What the hell was that supposed to be?" Kitty demanded, hoisting them onto the roof with difficulty due to her injured hand.
"It would have been an Inferno if you hadn't tripped over the syllables," Mandrake said sharply. "Forget the attacks – keep going."
Kitty ran across the roof, eyes on a door at one end that could only lead to a stairwell. A skeleton leapt up onto the roof in a single bound and landed with a few clicks of bone on concrete, blocking the door. Kitty skidded to a halt and began skittering backwards. Mandrake, thankfully, had fallen silent, probably mute from terror. Honorius' mask hid the face of the skull, but on the seventh plane Kitty could see his maniacal grin.
"At last," the skeleton cackled in the same crazed voice Kitty remembered from the crypt. "Thieving little mouse, I've finally caught you."
The skeleton stepped forward and was immediately hit by three powerful Infernos. Kitty looked around, startled, and nearly fell backwards over the edge of the roof. As she recovered her balance, she watched three djinn in the form of eagles soaring around the roof in deliberate formation, firing Detonations at Honorius, who was writhing in the deadly grasp of a Bind. A fourth djinni, this one in the shape of a large, black creature with leathery wings, landed in front of Mandrake and said, "Mr. Mandrake, I am going to take you back to Whitehall. My comrades will deal with the afrit."
She, for the voice had been female – extended her wings and Kitty got onto her back, grabbing onto a dark spike sticking out of the back of the creature's neck to keep her balance as it took off. Kitty looked over her shoulder and saw the skeleton struggling against the attacks of the three djinn, although to her horror Kitty saw that the afrit was more than holding its own against them.
"They can't beat him," Kitty said.
"They will delay him," the djinni carrying them said calmly, and started a long, arcing descent towards Whitehall.
-
Kitty had withdrawn from Mandrake's body as soon as they landed, and followed him into the building. He looked badly shaken, but was visibly composing himself as he went, straightening his shirt – his jacket was probably still on the fire escape where Kitty had left it – and tie. He headed purposefully down a carpeted hallway and pushed open the door at the end. Kitty looked around and saw the Prime Minister, whose face she easily recognized from the photographs alongside articles she had read daily in newspapers, standing behind a massive desk and looking deeply concerned.
"Our security djinn saw that you were being attacked and raised the alarm," Devereaux said without preliminaries. "This is most disturbing, John – it seems to have been a personal attempt on your life. We don't know who is controlling that afrit, but once we find out who he is, he will be quickly disposed of."
"Thank you sir."
"Now. Are you injured?"
"Not seriously," Mandrake answered, glancing at his burned fingers.
Kitty wasn't listening at this point – she was thinking about what the Prime Minister has said, that the attack had been focused on Mandrake. Certainly he had been caught up in the mess, but Honorius had seemed to be after her. Kitty strongly suspected that if she had left Mandrake in the restaurant and gone off on her own, Honorius would have ignored the magician and pursued her instead.
And she hadn't even been able to defend herself, she reflected angrily. She had been completely helpless. If the djinn hadn't come along when the afrit had them cornered on the roof, they would have been done for.
The only good thing was that Kitty's aura was now more violet-blue than anything else. Acts of heroism apparently came with pretty nice bonuses as far as her soul was concerned. Kitty left the office with Mandrake and asked, "Where are we going now?"
"Home," he answered shortly. "The Prime Minister has been kind enough to send a djinni with us for protection, in case the other three haven't subdued Honorius."
"He was after me," Kitty said as they approached his car, over which the same djinni that had transported them to Whitehall hovered, beating her leathery wings lazily to stay aloft. "You heard him."
"Yes," Mandrake said, sounding troubled. "And I doubt anyone's controlling him. He died when he attacked the golem."
"That's what Bartimaeus said, I think," Kitty agreed. "And now it looks like he's after me even though he's dead. He's got a real one-track mind."
"If he's dead and back like you," Mandrake said, his voice inaudible to the driver due to the glass blocking the back of the car from the front. "The djinn can't kill him again. He'll just keep coming after you."
"And I can't even fight him," Kitty said, clenching her fists. "He'd rip me apart."
Mandrake was silent for several moments, apparently in deep thought.
"If you're going to be here helping me," he said at last, "I could at least arrange for you to be protected. If you can't use spells yourself, I'll summon something that can."
He looked at her levelly.
"Bartimaeus."
-
I have to tell you, barely a year in mortal time is not nearly enough to assuage the pain left over from a stressful visit to the human world. It's like going to see an old, ugly, obnoxious great-aunt who insists on keeping you in a bone-crushing hug for the entire duration of your stay – it's uncomfortable, it smells terrible, and it takes ages for all the kinks in your system to work themselves out. A year simply isn't long enough.
Understandably, I appeared in the pentacle (amidst a veritable hurricane that threatened to break free of the constrains of the repressive device – very impressive) in a bit of a foul mood. And Nat was the absolute last person I wanted to see.
If I hadn't caught sight of a familiar girl literally floating off to the side, it's just possible I would have killed him.
Instead, mindful of Kitty Jones (whose presence, I admit, had me a bit befuddled), I settled for bellowing "What the hell are you playing at, you idiot?" loudly enough to shake the ceiling. The boy winced and massaged his temples, looking like he was regretting ever having thought of calling me to earth again. Good. If he didn't regret it, I'd fear I was losing my touch.
"Bartimaeus," he said, his reasonable tone making my blood boil. "I realize it hasn't been long since I last summoned you, however," here he raised his voice to drown me out, for I had begun to tell him exactly just how short my return to the Other Place had been, "However, I'm not summoning you because of me. Kitty needs your help."
"Oh, marvelous tactic," I said sarcastically. "Use the girl to stir up sympathy. Look, pal, I don't know how you managed to conjure up an illusion of her," for I had decided that this was the only logical explanation for the reappearance of someone who had died in a pathetic act of selflessness a year before, "But don't think that dangling an innocent commoner in front of me is going to keep me from ripping out every organ in your body and–"
"I'm not an illusion," the girl said firmly, interrupting what would have built into a lovely tirade.
"Of course you're not," I said in a tone of condescending kindness. "And I'm just the king of Spain dropping in for a chat with a long-lost friend."
Nat rolled his eyes and turned to the girl, who was still hovering a good three inches over the ground. "Maybe you should explain it."
Kitty promptly launched into an explanation of the afterlife involving tunnels, spectral trails, soul residue, and – this one was disturbing – tunnel mites using drugs. I started staring blankly at the point where she shot back into the mortal coil, sending an armchair flying. Kitty rounded it off with, "And I somehow have to turn him into a good person, otherwise I'll go straight to hell. And now that mad afrit Honorius is after me, and –"
"Whoa. Wait."
By this point I had discarded my illusion theory. There was no way one could be this realistic. And when you're the inhabitant of the Other Place, your imagination can stretch to pretty impressive limits.
"Honorius is stalking you? You must be mistaking him from another raving lunatic."
"I'm not," she said flatly. "He took on the guise of Gladstone's skeleton, he knew my name, and he made a reference to the crypt."
"Huh."
In the guise of Ptolemy, I floated cross-legged on eye level with both of them. "What happened, exactly?"
Nat, apparently weary of not hearing the musical sound of his own voice, took over: "We were in a restaurant on my lunch hour–"
"What, she can eat?"
"No," Kitty said sulkily, looking depressed.
"That's rough."
"As tragic as it is, that's not the point," Nathaniel said impatiently. He went on to relate how Honorius had ripped apart the restaurant, caught sight of Kitty, and pursued them onto the roof of a building.
"If those djinn hadn't come, we would have been dead," he finished. "And that brings me to the reason I've summoned you – since Kitty's in danger and she can't protect herself using magic, she needs you to be a sort of bodyguard."
"Well…"
I unfolded my legs and planted my feet on the floor. "I can't say I relish the idea of going up against the vengeful spirit of Honorius constantly…"
"Please, Bartimaeus," Kitty wheedled, going so far as to clasp her hands in front of her. "If you don't, Honorius will get me and I won't be able to help Mandrake, and then I'll be in hell for eternity. Do you want that to happen to me?"
"I don't see why it should be my concern," I said bluntly. For some reason, humans seem to think that if you were forced to help them on one occasion, suddenly the two of you are best friends. Kitty had impressed me when we met last year, but I didn't feel any affection towards her at all. I had done what I needed to do – that was that. If I gave her helpful hints and engaged her in a stimulating conversation, that was for my own entertainment, nothing else.
Kitty looked hurt. That figured. But five thousand years of toil and magnificent deeds would have gone to waste if I was unable to maintain a stony heart when faced with a girl's tragic expression, knowing that without my protection she would be unable to help the kid and therefore be subjected to eternal torment…oh, hell (no pun intended).
"Look. If I agree to watch out for you for a little while, it's not because of you. It's because if one of you deserves to be in hell, it would be the tight-suited pansy over there and not you. Hopefully once you've accomplished your little mission, you'll float off to heaven and he'll change right back to the prat he is now and secure himself a position in the underworld."
In all honesty, any words after "a little while" were wasted – Kitty was grinning like a maniac and obviously wasn't listening to a thing I said. Nat looked relieved, apparently choosing to ignore my ill wishes towards the state of his soul.
"Good," he said briskly, rubbing his hands together. "In that case, you agree to protect Kitty until she has completed her mission here?"
"Yeah, all right," I said begrudgingly. If I was going to do this, it didn't mean I had to do it with grace. "But then I'm going straight home, do you hear me?"
"Absolutely," Nat said grandly, waving a hand about carelessly. Unfortunately, it didn't even graze the edge of his pentacle. Curse my luck.
"So," I said to Kitty as Nat spat out a few protective clauses and stepped out of the circle, "You can't eat, you can't fight…what can you do?"
-
On a flame-scarred and battered rooftop some miles away, the last of three djinn perished with an agonized shriek in a burst of black flames. Honorius, who had maintained the guise of his old skeleton prison throughout the battle even though it wasn't the most practical for fighting against winged enemies, crouched low to the ground and attempted to recover his strength.
But an irresistible force was drawing him out of the human world, and he couldn't withstand it for more than a few seconds; the fight with the djinn had weakened him too much.
"No…" he hissed as his form began to break apart, and dug his flickering fingers into the concrete, but it was too late. The skeleton on the roof seemed to be sucked into the surrounding air, and his spirit was drawn back into the tunnel.
Satan was not pleased with his return.
